'Flashing yellow': Trump handed deadline to stave off a midterm disaster

As the 2026 midterm elections fast approach, President Donald Trump has mere “months” to stave off an electoral disaster for the Republican Party, according to one political scientist who warned Trump he's on a tight deadline.

“[Trump] has a few more months to figure out how he wants to impact public impressions of the economy before a frame gets drawn around the midterms, said political scientist Lanhee Chen, who also served as Mitt Romney’s senior advisor for his 2012 presidential bid, speaking with the Financial Times in a report published Saturday.

“The ability of Republicans to retain control of the House and Senate is going to depend in no small part on his ability to tell a positive economic story.”

Republicans face an uphill battle heading into the midterms as the impacts from Trump’s tariff policy and his signature domestic policy bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, start to take effect.

Wall Street analysts have already sounded the alarm that Trump’s economy is “going in the wrong direction,” with job growth continuing to slow, prices continuing to rise, and there being no manufacturing job boom as Trump had promised as a result of his tariffs.

Now just over one year away, the 2026 midterm elections will likely be a referendum on the American economy, Chen argued, and more specifically, on Trump’s ability to weave a “positive economic story.”

While the window of time for Trump to do so is shrinking quickly, the opportunity still exists, argued Ylan Mui, who leads the Washington-based consultancy group Pentra Group, though it would necessitate a sharp course correction from the Trump administration.

“The silver lining for President Trump is that a slowing job market could help him get what he really wants: lower interest rates,” Mui told the Financial Times.

“In addition, the downward revision for June and temporary ‘technical difficulties’ at BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] also give him new ammunition in his ongoing battle against the agency. Ultimately, Trump can still make the case that the solution to any perceived problem in the job market is for his administration to take more control of the economy, not less.”

However, Erica Groshen, former commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was not hopeful that Trump could pull it off based on the current economic trends. She said that the latest job numbers were a clear sign that the economy was “flashing yellow, speaking on the Financial Times’ “Swamp Notes” podcast on Friday.

“What we see is that the US economy is essentially not creating jobs,” Groshen said, as reported by the outlet. “The three-month average change is 29,000, which is basically zero for an economy of the size that we have.”